Re: nl2br and <br />

On Fri, 2003-06-27 at 14:07, Raymond C. Rodgers wrote: > I'm sure that this has probably been discussed before, but I couldn't > seem to find any direct references to such a discussion. The line break > tags that nl2br() produces have the forward slash embedded in them, > which is not in the HTML 4.x standard. While this isn't a big deal > really, the fact of the matter is that web browsers built to the > specifications of the W3C HTML 4.x standards may not like this. In fact > the W3C HTML validator reports this as an error. > > I read on the function description page that this is apparently an XHTML > curiosity. Would it be possible for someone to add an optional flag to > nl2br() to specify HTML rather than XHTML compliance? For instance, a > call to nl2br() without XHTML compliance might look like this: > > $mystring=nl2br($myotherstring,false); > > For compatibility's sake, maybe default the flag to true and make the > flag optional. If unspecified, the call to nl2br() would continue to > function as it always has. However if specified, and set to false, the > function would return the HTML compliant break tag <br>. > > Thoughts? Comments? > -- > Raymond C. Rodgers > http://bbnk.dhs.org/~rrodgers/ > http://www.j-a-n.net/ Hi there, This has actually been beaten to death over the years. One place to start reading in the archives: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-dev&w=2&r=1&s=nl2br+AND+xhtml&q=b This will give links to some discussions and a few bug reports on the topic. Anyway, the argument goes something like this: <br> is not XHTML compliant, but <br /> is. There are browsers which do not like <br/>, but all are supposed to ignore unrecognized attributes, which is what the / gets interpreted as when there is a space before it--which is why <br /> is output instead of <br/>. To my knowledge, in the 3 years of sporadic debate on the topic, nobody has yet come forward with a demonstration of a browser which incorrectly handles <br />. If you're having trouble validating, see if using html 4 transitional helps any. Otherwise, the function is easily doable yourself in a couple of lines of code. However, if you read all that and still think you've got a shot at changing the minds of the dev team, feel free to open a new feature request bug report in the bug database at http://bugs.php.net. Note that I'm not going to argue for or against. :) Hope this helps, Torben -- Torben Wilson <torben@php.net> +1.604.709.0506 http://www.thebuttlesschaps.com http://www.inflatableeye.com http://www.hybrid17.com http://www.themainonmain.com -----==== Boycott Starbucks! http://www.haidabuckscafe.com ====-----